a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Here is a hydrogen gas dispenser station that I noticed as I was filling up my rental car with fossil fuel gas on Thursday. Whoah, cool ! Let me take a closer look, I thought. I’m still on the look-out for catching a glimpse of a FCV (Fuel Cell Vehicle, such as a Toyota Mirai), on the freeways here in California.
I spent some time in Salinas this morning, and then drove up on Highway 101 by San Jose, Palo Alto and Mountain View up north to SFO International Airport to catch my flight to Seattle. Here is a picture of San Francisco Bay shortly after our take-off from the airport.
It was Veterans Day here in the USA, and we are saluted our war veterans around the country. I had time this afternoon to go check out the Monterey waterfront and walk up to Cannery Row and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
I’m staying in Monterey, but did
not have a lot of time to look around on Tuesday. (I hope to have more time on Wednesday). I chose to drive up to Salinas via Pacific Coast Highway (the locals just called it ‘PCH’), also called California State Route 1 or simply Highway 1.
The drive took me through Castroville, that bills itself as ‘the artichoke center of the world’.
I packed my bags on Sunday and
traveled out on Monday morning. I was not going to the project office though. We now have users in the field that have started to use our system, so I drove down to Salinas after arriving at San Francisco airport.
It was very wet at San Francisco airport, and it rained all the way during my drive down to Salinas as well.
Target is my go-to-store for replenishing essential household and bathroom supplies such as paper towels, toilet paper, detergent, bar soap and ‘Soft Scrub’. The store does have a nice variety of all kinds of other stuff such as clothing, shoes, electronics, bedding, kitchen supplies, toys and stationery.
There was a time when shoppers would say jokingly ‘I’m going to Targét (a ‘French’ pronunciation) .. a nod at the stylish but affordable offerings of the store. I think the store has lost a little of its panache, though. I have not heard of the Targét moniker in a long, long time.
There are a lot of scenes from the city of Budapest in the 2015 spy-spoof flick ‘Spy’, starring Melissa McCarthy, Jude Law and Jason Statham.
Some of them feature the Gresham Palace, now a Four Seasons hotel. Hey! I know that place, and I love that building, I thought when I saw it on the screen. My colleague and I went there for cocktails many years ago. So I had to dig up the picture I took of it, and here it is.
The October
jobs report for the world’s largest economy (the USA, measured by gross domestic product*) was very positive : 270,000 jobs added. That’s a lot more than the 180,000 that had been expected. And economists now say a December federal funds rate hike is almost a certainty.
*Another way to compare the sizes of the economy in countries is by purchasing power parity. By this measure, the size of China’s economy is actually slightly larger than that of the USA.
Here is last Friday’s mushroom now in ‘full bloom’.
Alas, I have no toads in my backyard to come and sit on it !
The death rate diagram below is from Monday’s New York Times, from a study by two Princeton economists. It shows the shocking counter-trend of death rates for middle-aged white Americans. They do worse – far worse than any other industrialized nation – and worse than any other race and ethnic groups in the USA (African American, Latino, Asian), and other generations. And no, it’s not the big killers like heart disease and diabetes, says the article, but an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids. The article shot to the top of the most-emailed list, and attracted nearly 1,900 comments.
Today is election day for cities, counties and states across the USA. (Not quite as exciting as next year’s presidential election and US Senate or House of Representative elections, but at least it’s something, right?). It looks as if the ‘Let’s Move Seattle’ levy to improve transportation infrastructure is going to pass, as is the ‘Best Starts’ levy to increase funding for early education for very young kids. Ksharma Sawant, the unabashed socialist candidate for Seattle City Council, is leading in the polls as well.
In other local news, the rumors have been confirmed : Amazon has opened it’s first brick- and-mortar bookstore (actually made of brick and mortar) here in Seattle. Whatever out of this world books could they be offering inside, I wonder? The store is small, says the first reports – not nearly as big as a typical Barnes & Noble bookstore – but offers a nice experience. I will have to go and take a look. Surely there will be Kindles for sale as well !
It is 100 years ago this November
that Albert Einstein published his series of four papers called ‘The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity’, each separated from the other by a week: on the 4th, 11th, 18th and the 25th of November 1915. From the Einstein Archives Online : ‘In Einstein’s universe, gravity is not regarded as an exterior force, but rather as a property of space and time, or spacetime. Einstein’s curved four-dimensional spacetime ‘continuum’ is often likened to a suspended rubber sheet stretched taut, but deformed whenever heavy objects – stars, galaxies or any other matter – are placed on it. Thus, a massive body like the sun curves the spacetime around it and the planets move along these curved pathways of spacetime. As Einstein put it : ‘matter tells space how to bend; space tells matter how to move’.
It is of course one thing to put forth a philosophical theory, but Einstein did much more than that. He wrote up a set of ten equations known as the Einstein Field Equations that described the fundamental interactions of gravitation, matter and energy in spacetime.
Most of us here in the USA set our clocks back one hour on Saturday night (back to Standard Time). A state such as Arizona is on Mountain Standard Time all year. And these days only dumb, disconnected mechanical clocks require adjustment. My iPhone’s little clock is smart and changes on its own.
So where does my iPhone’s time come from? Well, it comes from GPS satellites that broadcast the time to cell towers, from where the smartphones pick it up. And GPS satellites get their times from atomic clocks at the US Naval Observatory (a whole bunch of them).
In 1967, scientists got together and defined one second as equivalent to the time it takes a cesium atom to move 9,192,631,770 times between two particular energy levels. That defines the time in terms of 16 decimal points of a second. Is that really necessary? Well, yes .. GPS satellites that are out of sync by as little of one billionth of a second with the master time will already result in inaccuracies of a few feet on the ground, so these GPS satellite times are literally synced to the nanosecond. Researchers are working on atomic fountain clocks, to push the definition of time out to 18 decimal points (a hundred times more accurate than today’s clocks, or an accuracy of 1 second in 300 million years). But at that point, relativity and quantum effects start to take hold : an atomic clock a few feet higher than one right next to it will consistently run slower than one at the lower height due to the differences in the earth’s gravity at the two points.
For further explanations and speculations on time measurement, check out this little video clip from Wired Magazine/ The Atlantic magazine link.
It’s the mushroom time of year again here in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and the white and red toadstool mushrooms are making their appearance again in my backyard. Those marks are squirrel nibbles! I guess they try it and then go back to the maple seeds (with the brown propeller wings, in the foreground).
.. and I thought this ghoulish picture below of Wahlberg’s epauletted* fruit bat is quite fitting to help us prepare. I found it in a Mother Jones article. (Quite a mouthful, the creature’s name! .. and the bat in the picture below has a mouth full of fruit, explaining its puffy cheeks).
*An epaulet is an adornment consisting of an ornamental cloth pad worn on the shoulder, much as some military uniforms have. I guess the bat has something that looks like an epaulet on its shoulder.
There was another Republican presidential debate last night, and I watched some of it. I guess it was entertaining (in the way that clowns are); at the same time it was really unsettling to me, to think that one of these guys (or Ms. Carly Fiorina) could become President in 2016. Donald Trump was much quieter than usual and Jeb Bush had a really bad night. An all-out attack he made on his erstwhile protégé Sen. Marco Rubio backfired so badly, that the broad consensus among pundits now is that his candidacy is all but dead. Amazingly, the 2016 US Presidential general election is still a full year away.
Word on Tuesday was that a budget deal has been struck between the White House and Congress to avoid another debt-ceiling fiscal calamity. The two-year agreement would raise domestic and defense spending by $80 billion and lift the national borrowing limit until March 2017. There are also cuts to the Social Security disability program and to Medicare, though. The Federal debt stands at about $18 trillion, two-thirds of it added just in the last decade, as this infographic from the White House website shows. (So some politics written into the chart? Red is Republican and Blue is Democratic. The chart says the George W. Bush tax cuts added $5 trillion to the debt. The chart also says the US Government owes the Social Security Trust Fund $14 trillion).
<Sigh> I thought on Sunday, as I felt 
progressively worse and canceled my Monday morning travel to San Francisco : we are starting to build fusion reactors but we cannot yet stop the common cold virus. Does Vitamin C help? Not really : WebMD says ‘Vitamin C has been studied for many years as a possible treatment for colds, or as a way to help prevent colds. But findings have been inconsistent. Overall, experts have found little to no benefit from vitamin C for preventing or treating the common cold’.
TIME magazine has an excellent write-up on the on-going efforts – and progress made – to build a fusion reactor to solve the world’s needs for cheap energy. Check it out here. The engineering challenges are mind-boggling, but so are the possibilities, if humanity can ever solve the challenge of harnessing the energy released by controlled nuclear fusion. From the TIME article : The endgame for these companies isn’t acquisition by Google followed by a round of appletinis. It’s an energy source so cheap and clean and plentiful that it would create an inflection point in human history, an energy singularity that would leave no industry untouched.
One of our Democratic Party 2016 presidential candidates – Bernie Sanders – is a democratic socialist. (As opposed to a socialist. Sanders isn’t pushing for government to take over large sections of the economy. He does want the government to pay for health care and college tuition to a much larger extent, even for college tuition to be free, and for rich people to pay more taxes).
Further out to the left on the political spectrum here in the race for one of the seats for Seattle City Council, we have a true socialist : Kshama Sawant (as far as I can tell from her eye-catching Soviet-era red* campaign posters). *A bad choice of color? Or maybe she wants people to see red. Check ’em out below. Comcast is a cable TV and internet services provider.
